Letters: heaven is a heat pump

Court creep

Sir: As a former foreign secretary, Sir Malcolm Rifkind gives eloquent voice to the conventional wisdom that the UK should remain within the ECHR not for our own sake but for the good of others (Letters, 7 October). On this view, membership of the ECHR has always been about foreign policy, not our own constitutional order.

This is a reasonable point, save that it does not grapple with the vast difference between the ECHR that the UK joined in 1950 and the law that has been invented by the Strasbourg Court in the meantime. The Court now openly admits that it remakes the Convention, not least by creating out of whole cloth extensive restrictions on states in relation to asylum and migration.

The British statesmen who (reluctantly) agreed to sign the ECHR would be appalled by the way in which the Court has abused its jurisdiction. In leaving the Convention, the UK would not be abandoning Europe to fascism, but would be restoring parliamentary democracy and the rule of law here.